The Raj Strikes Back

The UN has authorized intervention in Libya—which in practice is going to mean an American-led war. We’re not only talking about a no-fly zone but bombing as well, and “advisers” on top of that. This might be a good time to start a betting pool on when the ground war officially begins. Tomorrow we’ll have an essay by Gary Brecher—the War Nerd—exposing the folly of ostensibly small wars such as this. (The essay comes from our new issue, which went to press last week, but Brecher nails exactly what is happening now.)

Let me make a few impolitic observations at the outset. First, a number of the usual interventionist suspects—here’s looking at you, National Review—held off as long as they thought the anti-Gaddafi insurgents had a prayer of surviving, even winning. Why was that assumption wrong? Because it turns out Gaddafi has more support in Libya than anyone in the West was willing to believe. The insurgency could have and should have toppled him, if rosy estimates of Libyan solidarity against the dictator were true. But no.

What this means for Western intervention is that we won’t be liberating a country from a universally despised dictator, we will be taking sides in a civil war. Indeed, a civil war in which Gaddafi is not only the strongest force but quite possibly the most popular one. Nobody wants to believe that, but Gaddafi has not held onto power and so easily rolled up his opposition simply because he has shipped in sub-Saharan mercenaries.

Second, large-scale Western intervention will destroy the fragile Middle East revolution, and the Arab street will long remember this. The West is not talking about intervening against Bahrain, after all, to bail out protesters there. But it’s not just Western selectivity that’s at issue—anyone can see that Gaddafi is far worse than the Bahranis or Yemen’s Saleh. Rather, Western intervention, even if successful, will preclude certain outcomes in Libya. In Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood and other more or less intensely religious forces can vie for power with other protesters (as well as with the still-in-place military establishment, of course). Egypt gets a choice in its destiny. Will Libya under UN/NATO/U.S. peacekeepers? By limiting Libyan options, should Gaddafi fall, to possibilities that are comfortable to the West, our interventionists will discredit whatever pro-Western (or at least, non-anti-Western) revolutionaries there are and enrage the Islamists. The only people who will wind up reassured are the kleptocratic rulers of the Arab world. In effect, what Eric Margolis describes as the American Raj is taking an action that will allow clients like the Saudis to survive, while unruly protesters in Bahrain are stamped out and Libyans are told they may only choose a Karzai — or a Mubarak? — to succeed Gaddafi.

Absolutely nothing could be better calculated to provoke Islamist retaliation against the West. And the conditions the West will create in Libya promise to be most conducive to al-Qaeda-style militants: dictators like Gaddafi and Saddam Hussein murder their own people, of course, but they also murder any Islamist who threatens them. With the tyrant gone, not only the innocent but militants, too, will enjoy a newfound freedom. And don’t think you can crack down on them without collateral damage to human rights — in our own country we have seen the civil-liberties toll that comes with the Department of Homeland Security’s bogus War on Terror. (It’s a war on Americans’ right not to be strip searched by well-paid government agents.) At least we Americans have to keep up appearances. Arab and Muslim lands are very familiar with pure police-state measures taken in the name of fighting nationalists and Islamists. A Western-backed Libyan dictator will have his excuses ready made. And what kind of influence might such a figure have on neighboring Tunisia and Egypt?

The West is not intervening into a two-way war. Obama, Hillary, and the gang are taking us into a fragmentary nationalist and religious conflict that pits Islamist radicals and supposedly nice Westernizing computer geeks against Gaddafis or Mubaraks — only thereafter to pit the radicals and Westernizers against one another, the remnants of the old regime, and, as often as not, the foreign invader. This intervention will turn a genuine popular revolution — with all the pros and cons that such things entail — into another Iraq or Afghanistan. And we still aren’t done paying the price for those wars. Indeed, the lost lives of American soldiers and foreign civilians, and the trillions of taxpayer dollars poured into the sand, are just the downpayment. The highest cost of all is the strategic price that comes with shoring up client despots and undermining popular movements for reform or revolution. Western interventionists are doing exactly what al-Qaeda wants by enabling the argument that real revolution can only come to the Arab and Muslim worlds only once the meddling West has fallen.

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16 Responses to The Raj Strikes Back

This is largely UK and France led – US support came later. It’s likely the US will act in an (important) support role, including intelligence and diplomatic arm-bending.

“The insurgency could have and should have toppled him, if rosy estimates of Libyan solidarity against the dictator were true.”

The insurgency actually came very close, but were outmatched by the well trained loyalist (actually run by Ghadafi’s sons) troops, including their snipers, tanks, planes and helicopters. Waiting for 0% Ghadafi support before any intervention is too high a bar for intervention.

“We will be taking sides in a civil war”

Considering how close the revolution came to success without western firepower, arms, and support – it is unlikely to fail this time around.

“Large-scale Western intervention will destroy the fragile Middle East revolution, and the Arab street will long remember this.”

The converse could also be said to be true – if intervention was asked for, but denied, it could long be remembered. This action is at the invitation of the Arab League and the Libyan revolutionaries themselves, with a strict proviso about no invading forces – quite different to Iraq.

“This intervention will turn … into another Iraq or Afghanistan. And we still aren’t done paying the price for those wars. Indeed, the lost lives of American soldiers and foreign civilians, and the trillions of taxpayer dollars ”

With no ground forces and other countries leading the strikes, this action will be of very little risk to US personnel. The cost of this mission will be shared by Arab states, also. I for one hope that deaths can be minimized, as the least bad option out there.

It is hard to begin assessing this piece. It is full of fraudulent and extreme assumptions, and assertions that are as definitive as they are unprovable and unlikely.

First off, the author needs to read Rommel’s diaries. Libya is a unique topography where air supremacy is dispositive. When Qaddafi’s planes are eliminated from the skies, the only armor and artillery he will retain is that which is in cities among civilians. The rest will be destroyed and immobile. All lines of supply will be cut and all capacity to wage war will shrivel to nothingness. This is not Vietnam or Afghanistan or Yugoslavia… there are no forests, no jungles, no mountains, just a thin strip of open coastline bordered by desert. It is an environment Curtis LeMay would have custom-designed as a personal playground.

There is strong Arab support for intervention, and any land action or occupation is almost certainly to arise from Arabian involvement. At worst there will be UN blue helmets with a strong Arab component; a NATO or US-led ground force is not anything that anyone is even remotely proposing. Were any of the powers involved to be this stupid, some of the statements here would have some credibility. However there is absolutely no evidence of this.

To state that remote action to freeze and shrivel Qaddafi’s forces, which is all that is planned, ‘will destroy’ any liberalization movements in the Arab world is ridiculously definitive and unjustified by any fact. The underlying causes for such movements will not be affected one whit by the inevitable propaganda from Qaddafi. The proper analogies here, like them are not, are the first Gulf War with its strong Arab participation, and the no-fly zone over Kurdistan which essentially liberated it from Saddam Hussein’s regime.

Rommel, perhaps the best desert warrior ever, was unable to overcome British advantages in air power and supply. Qaddafi is unlikely to do any better. The worst case scenario here is that he hunkers down with some armor in Tripoli and perhaps other urban areas, holding the local populace hostage, leading to a blockade of such areas and a standoff. At that point what will decide the issue is what the Arabs do. This should be what is discussed, in the absence of evidence for the wild speculations made here.

Gaddfi’s forces are also using ships to carry out their attacks? Do we then establish a “No-Naval Zone?” to help the rebels. They also have the advantage in tanks as well. How about a “No-Tank Zone?” Add all these zones and pretty soon you have a military occupation. For a nation that’s supposedly broke, there always seems to be enough money in the couch seats to pull off these sorts of military interventions.

Sean Scallon wrote: “Do we then establish a “No-Naval Zone?” […] How about a “No-Tank Zone?” ”

Of course we do. “No” Zones are a growth industry, friend, maybe even the future of the US export economy! There’s your basic No-Walk Zone, the devilishly effective No-Go-To-Bathroom Zone, the whimsical No-Eating-Of-Cardamon Zone (successful roll-out in Gaza last year), and to top it all off a global No-Muslim Zone … brain child of our Founder, Norman Podhoretz, and comes with a lifetime guarantee. Full employment, here we come!

Gaddafi is not doing anything that our government (or almost any government, for that matter) would not do under similar circumstances: fight for its own survival. What did we do when the South tried to secede in 1861?

Should we really expect Gaddafi to use Rommel’s tactics from World War II rather than resort to, say, modern urban guerrilla warfare? He’s not going to be moving his armor through the open desert, he’ll keep it right where it’s hardest for allied attacks to get to without civilian casualties.

Are America, France, and Britain going to give the residents of Benghazi tanks that they don’t know how to operate and send them to liberate Tripoli? That’s a recipe for chaos. The no-fly zone can enforce a stalemate, but that and foreign arms together have little chance of turning the eastern rebels into an effective anti-Gaddafi army. Nor is it clear just how close the revolution came to toppling the dictator even when it had forward momentum: Tripoli seems to have been securely in Gaddafi’s hands the whole time. The prospects of the rebels storming Tripoli seem long.

On the one hand the Libyan people should be given the right to choose the direction for their country but on the other hand we all know what happened when the US handed over the responsibility to the Iraqi people after the successful military operation back in the 1990s so I think it is essential to force Kadhafi to step down and work together with the protesters to ensure that the future Libyan governmemt is not anti-American.

In answer to greg panfile
the article , rather than being full of fraudulent and extreme assumptions describes what has been the outcome for the past 40 years. Please, what are you talking about, the complexities of these situations rarely ever lead to anything that benefits this country. Let the Libyans win their freedom, then they will own it. This is also a wholly unconstitutional action.
Besides, we’re broke. Let the Congress count the cost and debate the financial implications and let all Americans know what it will cost each family. My guess is we would only go to war when we were attacked. This is not the case in this war,

I wonder: what exactly is the payoff for our assistance, direct or indirect? Support of democracy cannot be the answer, as our alliances with non-democratic actors in the region prove. What would the success of the rebels get us? In Iraq and Arabia, the answer has to be strategic control of oil–there simply isn’t any other way to explain why we would be there rather than any number of other places. I’ve heard about Libyan oil, but I wasn’t aware that it was a great producer.